Valyntina Grenier


PRESSED AGAINST THIS SMART GLASS

Happen to find yourself a particular afternoon notice a makeshift craft
floating through the narrow and bounded by steep shoulders waterway

Notice fairies harnessed/ boiled a ramshackle armada of miracles from the comparative
          wilderness caught that afternoon
Care evidently distrusting the order ‘wanted alive’

Hollowed out logs lashed to a skinny man w/ a burlap sack deemed to be snoozing
A rent in the net under the weight of streams blanketed with moss

The sun already knows my nickname
An arrow shot clean through my ribs
Clock fragmented clots of day

plan/ plant/ drain the fertile forest hills
the wilderness riding me
out across out-of-print autobiography

w/ a resonance of mathematics learned bargaining sharply
for apples can tease murderers and settlers to domesticate the frontier with old world exotics

Disparagement might return a golden habitat
an emblem of marriage
from man’s peculiar craft

passengers point at a sign
working for food
waiting for the bumblebee to wake up to hover among wide eyed

We give credit the power domestication represents
take to dance
Generations assume naive scenes

Animals sit it out
Nutritious acorns buried any arrangement with us long before
boatloads dependent on bank territory or at least the folk hero I figured

Modest our orchard or/
our childlike wishful/ wistful thinking
how lost

We accept fate in the tang of strangeness sweetened beyond recognition
a blemish free plastic dimension
one all-purpose-single-use-just-as-described-cheap-fake-sugar-substitute for the strong desire to
          live to

lounge in queerness
with no address
Hallow defiance

a night swim
a vegan frontier
do you mind
to ride a horse or punish a worm

Children are not rumors

For some cis-godfearing-rapist-white-men emphasis relies on her dress/
color of skin/ mitigation/ migration/ maps

Some far flung account/ song led to the river
the reality and the pipe littered behind




An LGBTQ+ multi-genre artist, Valyntina works with paint, ink, Neon, encaustic medium, recycled or repurposed materials and words. She is the author of the tête-bêche chapbook Fever Dream/ Take Heart (Cathexis Northwest Press, 2020) and In Our Now (Finishing Line Press, 2022). Find her at valyntinagrenier.com or Insta @valyntinagrenier

Next poem

Previous poem

Fall 2021